The Candice Malcolm Show - May 21, 2021


DEBUNKED： The biggest myths about the Israel⧸Hamas conflict


Episode Stats

Length

21 minutes

Words per Minute

170.49738

Word Count

3,709

Sentence Count

258

Hate Speech Sentences

47


Summary

In this episode, Candice Malan talks about some of the biggest myths and misconceptions about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and how they influence the way we think about it. She also talks about why she thinks it's not anti-Semitic to criticize Israel, and why she doesn't think it's anti-American to criticize them.


Transcript

00:00:00.000 Hi, I'm Candice Malcolm. I'm a Canadian journalist and political commentator. I write for the
00:00:12.160 Toronto Sun and I am the founder and editor-in-chief of True North. I want to do a video today
00:00:18.620 because I want to talk about the conflict going on in Israel, frankly, because I see a lot of
00:00:23.820 misinformation, a lot of propaganda, and a lot of myths when it comes to this conflict and to Israel
00:00:30.740 more broadly. Just first things first, I will put all of my biases out there. I'm not Jewish. I'm not
00:00:37.580 Muslim. I don't really have a dog in the fight other than the fact that I believe Israel is an
00:00:43.340 ally to Western countries like Canada and the United States. I think that Israel has the right
00:00:49.080 to defend itself against terrorist insurgencies and against adversarial actors that are in the
00:00:56.260 region. And I think that Israel is really a shining example of a pluralistic, peaceful, free society
00:01:04.540 in the Middle East. One of the very few, if not the only examples of a peaceful and free society in
00:01:11.600 the Middle East. So I think that Israel is admirable in many ways. But I also say that I don't think
00:01:18.340 it's anti-Semitic to criticize Israel. I think just like any government, it's fair game to criticize
00:01:23.740 politicians, to criticize policies, and to criticize government in Israel. And I'm also very sympathetic
00:01:31.760 to the people of Palestine, the Palestinian people, the Arabs living in the area. You know, everybody
00:01:38.380 wants there to be a peaceful solution. I had the opportunity to visit Israel and the West Bank and
00:01:46.840 speak to Arab Israelis, to speak to Palestinians when I was there back in 2015. And I was there as a
00:01:56.200 working journalist. And, you know, basically what I heard from people is a little bit different than
00:02:01.840 what you hear in the media. I spoke to Israelis, Jewish Israelis who hate their government. They're
00:02:07.680 not, you know, they're not big fans of Netanyahu. They think that he's corrupt. And, you know,
00:02:13.980 they don't like his domestic policies. The reason that he's so popular is because he is strong. He's
00:02:20.700 willing to fight fire with fire. He wants to decimate the terrorist insurgencies. And I think
00:02:27.140 that resonates with a lot of Israelis who just want this to be over with. They've tried, you know,
00:02:32.180 a lot of different ways to negotiate, to try to make peace deals, to try to make a two-state solution.
00:02:36.500 Nothing has worked. And they're just fed up, tired of the fighting, tired of the war, tired of, you
00:02:42.080 know, having loved ones be killed. And so they just want a strong leader that will end it. On the other
00:02:48.320 side, I also spoke to many Palestinians. What I heard from them a lot was actually a bit more surprising.
00:02:56.020 I heard people that were very, very critical of Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian leader. They said that he's
00:03:03.160 corrupt, that he refuses to hold elections, that he's weak, that he bows down to the terrorist
00:03:09.020 insurgencies. And so, you know, I don't think it's this black and white. I think you have Jewish
00:03:14.920 Israelis who are critical of their own government. You have Palestinians who hate the leadership and
00:03:19.640 the people that are making decisions on their side. And, you know, both sides just want this to
00:03:24.140 end. They just want to find peace. They want to live side by side. And, you know, they're not really
00:03:29.400 being very well represented by their leaders. So today I want to take a few minutes to go through
00:03:35.820 some of the biggest myths that I am seeing when it comes to the current clash. This one right now
00:03:40.580 in May 2021. So I had my friends over at True North come up with a couple of examples of these myths,
00:03:46.700 and I'm going to go through them for you right now. Myth number one, Palestinians were peaceful and
00:03:53.120 unarmed. And it was the Israeli forces that instigated this fight. And Palestinians were just
00:03:58.880 defending themselves. Well, this is just not true. So basically what happened was that there was a
00:04:05.740 riot at Temple Mount. This was clearly pre-planned. You can see, you know, so Temple Mount is the
00:04:13.400 holiest place in the Jewish religion. It's also the third holiest place in the Muslim religion,
00:04:18.180 which is why a lot of this conflict begins, because these two groups share a holy land, basically,
00:04:24.340 and they both want to control it. So Muslims were there, they were praying, and all of a sudden it
00:04:30.340 devolved into a riot. Well, the problem is that we saw some pictures here that show that this riot
00:04:36.840 looked like it was pre-planned. There were giant slabs of concrete and rocks that were placed everywhere
00:04:42.960 to sort of encourage Palestinian protesters to get violent. There were reports of rioters that were
00:04:49.320 throwing Molotov cocktails, which are basically just firebombs. So they're throwing firebombs,
00:04:54.440 they're throwing fireworks. They're really agitating the Israeli police and kind of just encouraging the
00:05:01.040 police to overreact. And we saw that a little bit with, you know, the same kind of riot control that
00:05:06.080 you would see in a North American city during an Antifa riot, you know, using tear gas and trying to
00:05:11.960 just clear the area and move people out. Well, that was sort of the origin of this battle.
00:05:17.460 And then Hamas began firing its rockets. So first it fired rockets into Jerusalem. Even though it's
00:05:24.460 supposedly, you know, the holy city of Jerusalem, Hamas is firing rockets into Jerusalem. And that is
00:05:31.860 what, that is what prompted this entire battle. Israel didn't respond for hours later. And so the
00:05:38.620 idea that somehow, that somehow Israel started this is just, it's just not true. The facts are on the
00:05:44.960 other side. And so, you know, that's that. Let's go on to the next myth. Number two, Israel is an
00:05:53.520 apartheid state. We saw a couple of Green Party MPs tweeting this, of course. In the US, AOC said that
00:06:01.780 it was an apartheid state. Let's just be clear about something. Okay, the definition of apartheid,
00:06:06.340 most people when they think of apartheid, they think of South Africa, where there were separate laws,
00:06:10.440 separate institutions, separate public availability for white South Africans versus black South
00:06:17.260 Africans. So separate, separate system of law. So the definition of apartheid is a policy or system
00:06:24.180 of segregation or discrimination on the grounds of race. Well, that's just simply not the case in
00:06:30.940 Israel. There are no separate laws for different races. There aren't even separate laws for different
00:06:35.380 religions. About 20% of the population of Israel is made up of Arab Israelis. So Arabs who live in
00:06:42.680 Israel, I'm not talking about the disputed territories, not Gaza, not West Bank, but the
00:06:47.240 actual territory of Israel, about 20% of the population is Arab, and they have full access to
00:06:53.020 every institution the same way as a Jewish Israeli or a Christian Israeli or any other religion of
00:06:59.940 Israelis. So the idea that they're separate systems of government simply isn't true. There are Arabs
00:07:06.140 that are represented in the parliament in Israel that you see, you know, Arabs in positions of power as
00:07:14.140 judges, as justices, elected officials, teachers, police officers, their positions throughout the
00:07:20.620 society. So the idea that somehow that there's like separate buses and separate schools and separate
00:07:26.220 restaurants for Arabs versus Jews is just not true. That's not what it's like in Israel. I think a lot
00:07:33.920 of people who push this out there are just sort of playing on emotions. And also, maybe they're
00:07:41.280 talking about the Arabs who live in the disputed territories. Well, that that is separate. But the
00:07:46.480 idea here is that both sides want a two state solution. So, you know, the territories that are
00:07:52.800 disputed, like Gaza, is governed by Hamas, and and the West Bank is governed by the Palestinian
00:07:59.620 authorities. So they have their own governments, which are Arab. And so, you know, the idea that they
00:08:06.900 would be like held under Israeli law, that doesn't really go in line with the two state solution. So the
00:08:13.560 idea of apartheid is just a myth. Let's go to number three, which is that Israel is guilty of war crimes.
00:08:22.080 We hear this a lot that that Israel targets civilians, that Israel kills children. This
00:08:29.200 simply isn't the case. It's actually Hamas. It's Hamas who fires its rockets indiscriminately into
00:08:35.120 Israel, hoping to hit civilian targets. When Hamas fires thousands of rockets in one night, the whole
00:08:40.940 point is to overwhelm Israel. Israel has the Iron Doom program, which is something really remarkable.
00:08:46.640 It is actually a very cool piece of technology that when Hamas shoots a rocket towards civilians
00:08:52.560 in neighborhoods in Israel, Israel has the capacity to shoot that rocket down. And the reason that Hamas
00:08:58.120 fires so many at once is because the Iron Dome is only capable really of firing down about 90%
00:09:04.460 of those rockets. So the other 10% go through. So just through sheer numbers, Hamas tries to overwhelm
00:09:11.720 the system firing at civilian targets. They actually don't even care whether they hit Arab Israelis or
00:09:17.640 Jewish Israelis. They don't even care if they hit Gazans. A lot of times these rockets fall short,
00:09:23.000 and they actually end up landing in Gaza killing kids and families, which is partially why the death
00:09:29.240 count is so disproportionate. People think that the fact that a lot of people are dying in Gaza and not a lot
00:09:34.680 of people are dying in Israel. We have dozens on one side and hundreds on the other. It's not simply
00:09:40.200 because Israel's dropping more bombs. It's partially because Gaza is just so reckless that many of its
00:09:46.840 own rockets land on its own people. And then as far as the war crimes of Israel, look, this is very well
00:09:53.320 known and well documented that Hamas is a terrorist insurgency and they use the people in Gaza as a human
00:10:00.680 shield. And you probably heard this term before, human shield. Basically, Hamas hides among civilians.
00:10:07.000 They fire their rockets from the streets in densely populated neighborhoods. Their rockets are getting
00:10:11.480 launched from, you know, a small area between two apartment buildings. And so it makes it really,
00:10:16.840 really hard for Israeli troops to fire back and to try to kill the operatives who are firing the rockets
00:10:22.920 because they're hiding among civilians. And so Israel goes to great, great efforts to try to stop this.
00:10:30.680 When they're going to bomb a known asset, a known Hamas asset, they give advance notice. They give
00:10:38.280 warning. They send text messages. They drop leaflets. They're pleading for citizens to leave. They want
00:10:44.120 people to leave. They are begging for families, you know, mothers, families, children, get out. We're going to
00:10:50.920 be attacking this building because Hamas are operating here. Get out. The reason that many
00:10:56.040 people stay is because of the intimidation by the terrorists themselves. They encourage people to
00:11:01.160 stay. They tell them not to leave. They want them to stay, to act as a human shield so that Israel cannot
00:11:07.160 bomb. And then if Israel does bomb, they get the bad, horrible publicity and the blood on their hands
00:11:13.400 of killing families and kids. It's horrible. You know, the reality of any war is that it's horrendous and
00:11:19.400 by nature, you know, sides are killing each other. People are getting killed. People are getting
00:11:23.640 blown up. Sometimes civilians get caught in the crossfire. The difference is that Israel tries
00:11:29.160 really, really hard to minimalize this, whereas Hamas does the exact opposite. Here's an example of
00:11:35.320 Israel. You know, they're trying to shoot down a Hamas asset and they realize that there were kids
00:11:41.320 there and so they abort the mission. Here's what that looks like.
00:11:59.320 And so again, Israel is making every effort it can not to commit war crimes. Whereas again, on the other
00:12:05.560 side of the equation is Hamas, who is committing war crimes because they are intentionally aiming at
00:12:12.520 civilians in Israel. And it's also worth noting that, you know, it's not just that they fire their
00:12:16.760 rockets from amidst civilian areas. They also plant their headquarters beneath a hospital, a civilian
00:12:23.240 hospital so that Israel can't bomb it without, you know, blowing up this hospital. Tunnel entrances
00:12:29.240 is well documented that an entrance to a tunnel, which is where the Hamas leaders will use
00:12:34.040 to sneak underground and go into Israel. The tunnel entrance will be right next to a mosque,
00:12:39.320 right next to a school, right next to a kindergarten, making it again really, really
00:12:42.760 hard for Israel to try to take that out without having these mass casualty situations. And so Israel
00:12:49.080 kind of has its hands tied, making it harder to combat Hamas. And then if it ever does, you know, having
00:12:54.920 to deal with the bad press. So again, it's just a myth that Israel is committing war crimes.
00:13:00.360 The next myth that we hear is that Israel is guilty of ethnic cleansing. Again, this is just
00:13:07.720 not true. So the definition of ethnic cleansing is the mass expulsion or killing of members of one
00:13:14.280 ethnic or religious group in one area by another area. So it's not quite as bad as genocide, but it's
00:13:20.840 almost there. It's kind of like right next to genocide in terms of forcibly removing one ethnic
00:13:25.720 group or killing them all. That's a very, very harsh accusation to be made. And again, there just
00:13:33.080 really isn't evidence of that. So, you know, when it comes to people who get moved, you know, this,
00:13:39.880 this whole thing, we hear a lot about the evictions that were happening at Sheikh Jarrah. Basically,
00:13:45.720 this is a legal dispute that has been in the court for decades. And so they're using a legal
00:13:51.240 mechanism according to the rule of law to lawfully evict squatters who live in six houses. And we're
00:13:58.920 told that this process somehow equates to ethnic cleansing. It's just not true. The reality,
00:14:04.600 of course, is the exact opposite. Jews and Christians have been the victims of ethnic
00:14:09.240 cleansing throughout the Middle East for over a hundred years. There have been sustained campaigns
00:14:13.720 of ethnic cleansing against Jews targeting Jews to leave their homes and to move. The reason that so
00:14:19.480 many people have moved to Israel in the last 70 years is because Israel is a safe haven. Israel is
00:14:25.960 where Jews can go when they get kicked out and they get pushed out and they get victims of these
00:14:31.560 barbaric regimes in neighboring countries. And you can just look at the population changes throughout the
00:14:38.360 Middle East since the middle part of the last century. So as an example, in Egypt in 1956,
00:14:46.760 the Egyptian government declared all Jews the enemy of the state and immediately began a systemic
00:14:52.440 expulsion. Again, that is ethnic cleansing. Similar things happened in Iran, in Iraq, in Syria.
00:14:58.920 This is a report from the Jerusalem Post that says exactly what I'm saying. It says in 1948,
00:15:05.240 the year Israel was declared a state, 265,000 Jews lived in Morocco, 150,000 lived in Iraq, 140,000 in
00:15:13.960 Algeria, 100,000 in Egypt, 100,000 in Tunisia, 55,000 in Lebanon, 40,000 in Libya, 30,000 in Syria,
00:15:22.600 and thousands more throughout the Middle East and North Africa for a grand total of 880,000.
00:15:28.680 Shortly thereafter, over 850,000 Jews were expelled from the very countries they called home,
00:15:34.600 the Arab League rejected the establishment of the state of Israel and ultimately decided in forcing
00:15:40.120 out the absolute majority of Jews from their countries. Nearly one million Jews were forcibly
00:15:45.640 banished from their homes. So the reality of the state of Israel is that yes, Jews have been living
00:15:52.840 in this region for thousands of years. It's been very well documented. But during the second half of
00:15:58.760 the last century, they started getting removed from their countries, kicked out of their countries,
00:16:02.920 the victims of ethnic cleansing. So all of these people came to Israel to find a peaceful place
00:16:08.680 that they can live, where they can pray, where they can practice their religion without persecution.
00:16:13.400 And that is the modern story of Israel. People go there for safe haven and no, they're not practicing
00:16:20.120 in their own sort of ethnic cleansing. You can be of any religion and live in Israel, aside from being a
00:16:26.680 mecca for persecuted Jews from the region. It's also where persecuted minorities from other religions.
00:16:33.880 So you have Christians that live there, Baha'is, you have lots of persecuted gays, people who can't
00:16:39.160 live peacefully in other parts of the Middle East, go to Israel to live there. And it doesn't force
00:16:44.680 non-Jews to leave. That's just not true. And that myth kind of goes hand in hand with the next one that
00:16:50.680 we see a lot, which is that Israel is the creation of settler colonialism, that it's a white oppressor,
00:16:59.480 oppressing, you know, sort of brown-skinned people who live in the area. Again, when you go to Israel,
00:17:04.920 you realize that the Israelis that live there are Middle Eastern. They're not European Israelis.
00:17:11.560 You know, when you think of Jews, you might think of someone like Seth Rogen or Ben Shapiro,
00:17:16.520 who sort of look European. When you're in Israel, what you see is that most of the people that are
00:17:21.320 there are Middle Eastern. They had either been there for hundreds or thousands of years,
00:17:26.280 you know, their families have, or like I said, the people that were persecuted and forced to leave
00:17:30.920 Iran, forced to leave Morocco, forced to leave these other countries, but they're Middle Eastern.
00:17:35.800 So the whole idea that somehow it's just like white European country in the middle of the Middle East
00:17:41.960 sort of forced all the local people off. It's not correct. That's not accurate. It's sort of
00:17:47.480 using the metaphor of North America, trying to apply it, apply it onto Israel. And it's just not
00:17:53.880 the case. I encourage you to look into the history because there is a lot of history, but I will just
00:17:58.840 say that Jews have been living in Israel for thousands of years. And, you know, when it comes to the British
00:18:05.000 involvement, basically Israel, the territory that is Israel today was part of the Ottoman Empire.
00:18:10.440 When the Ottoman Empire fell during the First World War, the British stepped in with the
00:18:14.440 Palestine mandate. They managed it for a while. They ended up creating two states. So they created
00:18:19.320 an Arab state, which is Jordan. 98% of that country is Arab. And the other state they created was Israel,
00:18:25.960 which was governed by Jews. And so, you know, the whole idea that somehow this is the product of
00:18:33.160 white supremacy or, you know, colonialism. It really, really just isn't true. Okay. Myth number six,
00:18:44.280 Israel is targeting civilians and that it targeted a media headquarters. This is kind of tied to the
00:18:49.560 other myth that I did. And this will be the last myth. I'll leave it here. But the idea that Israel is
00:18:55.960 targeting citizens is just not true. They're targeting Hamas. It's just that Hamas, as any terrorist group,
00:19:01.160 you know, they're plain clothes. They're not soldiers. It's hard to hit military assets
00:19:05.960 because they are hidden amongst the civilians. And Israel does go to painstaking efforts to avoid
00:19:12.280 hitting civilians. It's just being reported that when it comes to this one building that people are
00:19:20.040 upset about, the Israeli defense shared intelligence with the U.S. defense, showing
00:19:25.320 why it was a legitimate target, why they had intel showing that Hamas was using it as a base.
00:19:31.560 Regardless, here we have Canadian Joel Simon, who's the executive director of the Committee to
00:19:36.600 Protect Journalists, saying that this attack raises concerns that Israel is targeting the media,
00:19:41.960 trying to disrupt coverage of the human suffering in Gaza. He demanded detailed and documented
00:19:47.560 justification for the attack. Well, that justification has been given. But again,
00:19:51.640 it's really important to understand that Hamas does use a human shield. It is very intentional.
00:19:56.760 It is part of their strategy. And journalists, look, we know what's going on. We know that this is what
00:20:01.640 they do. They do it time and time and time again. It's been very well documented. We shouldn't fall
00:20:07.000 prey to this narrative. We shouldn't accept this propaganda. And we should criticize it. We should lay
00:20:14.120 it out there so that people do understand that Israel's not targeting civilians. They're targeting
00:20:18.840 terrorists. It just so happens that the terrorists are mixed in. Okay, that's it for the myths. I'll
00:20:24.120 just finish by saying one thing. I said at the beginning of this video that it is okay to criticize
00:20:29.080 Israel. It is not anti-Semitic. I will just say that you get into dicey territory and borderline
00:20:34.920 anti-Semitism when you go out of your way to demonize Israel, when you don't think that the
00:20:40.520 only Jewish state in the world should have any right to exist or any right to defend itself,
00:20:45.320 when you're saying that, you know, they use disproportionate force. Well, just, you know,
00:20:50.600 put yourself in their shoes. Imagine for one second that Canada had a neighbor that was
00:20:56.120 run by terrorists that was bombarding us with bombs, shooting them into civilian neighborhoods.
00:21:00.760 And the stated goal of that terrorist group was to ensure that Canada didn't exist. The Canadians were
00:21:06.600 all killed or removed from the area. And that was their goal. Imagine how we would react. And so
00:21:12.680 before you criticize Israel, try to imagine what it's like to actually live there. Think about what
00:21:18.360 the people have gone through, the history of the region, understanding, you know, the different
00:21:23.000 aspects of play. It's not a simple oppressor, oppressed narrative that so many on the left love
00:21:28.680 to use. They always just simplify it and try to fit it into their narrow little worldview. But that's not
00:21:34.200 the case. I think that it is important that we dispel these myths in order to have a clearer
00:21:39.240 understanding of what is going on. All right. Thanks so much for watching. I'm Candace Malcolm for True North.